was some measure of agreement among the schools at the most general level. According to Epicurus, we
should 'refer all choice and avoidance to health of the body and tranquillity of the soul, since that is the
goal of a happy life'. Tranquillity or ataraxia ('untroubledness') had been similarly exalted in the old
Academy of Xenocrates, and it was to become the watchword of the Pyrrhonian sceptics. The Stoics, too,
acknowledged the same ideal; for 'they expel from mankind all the passions by which the mind is
disturbed - desire and delight, fear and grief.
In order to achieve tranquillity and to calm what Epicurus called 'the storm of the soul', we need only take
thought. It is an assumption implicit in Epicureanism that fears will dissipate once the beliefs on which
they are grounded are shown by philosophy to be false. Chrysippus explicitly contended that the passions
were themselves beliefs of a sort, and hence subject to rational control. Such optimistic rationalization is
no less foreign to the philosophy of Aristotle than the ethical quietism which it subserves.
That quietism is sometimes represented as a disengagement from social and political life, and it is
interpreted as a reaction to the tumultuous and troubled world of Hellenistic Greece. The interpretation is
implausible: life in Hellenistic Greece was no more upsetting, no more at the mercy of fickle fortune or
malign foes, than it had been in an earlier era. Nor does ataraxia imply a withdrawal into the self or an
obsessive individualism. Epicurus abjured the political life ('You must free yourself from the prison of
politics and the daily round'), but he placed happiness in friendship and society - and an Epicurean 'will
cultivate a king when it is opportune'. The Stoics valued social life, and they urged an involvement in
politics. According to Chrysippus, a wise man 'will willingly assume a kingship and make money from it -
and if he cannot be king himself he will live with a king and accompany a king to war'. Ataraxia was not
to be achieved by shunning the world.
Within that broad area of agreement, Epicurean and Stoic ethics are regularly presented as antithetical: if
both sects sought contentment, they sought it in contrary directions. For Epicurus, the direction was
determined by nature:
You need only possess perception and be made of flesh, and you will see that pleasure is good.
I summon you [he wrote to Anaxarchus] to continuous pleasures - and not to virtues which are empty and
vain and which hold out troubling expectations of rewards.
We say that pleasure is the beginning and end of a happy life; for we recognize it as a primary and innate
good, and from it we begin all choice and avoidance, and to it we return, judging every good thing by the
standard of that feeling.
In his own lifetime Epicurus was vilified as a crude and unlettered sybarite. But although he held that 'the
beginning and root of every good thing is the pleasure of the belly', his hedonism is not an excuse for
sensual indulgence. First, Epicurean pleasures are rationally selected, and the Epicurean is aware that
today's delights will be paid for by the misery of the morrow. That is why 'sometimes we pass over many
pleasures when greater discomfort follows for us as a result of them'. In fact, calculation reveals that 'the
pleasant life is produced not by a string of drinking-bouts and revelries, nor by the enjoyment of boys and